Chapter 17 — Cruelty and Clemency: Whether It Is Better to Be Loved Than Feared
It is safer to be feared than loved — because love depends on the men who hold it, and fear depends on the prince who commands it.
Summary
Every prince wishes to be considered clement rather than cruel, but clemency exercised without judgment produces disorder, which injures everyone. Machiavelli's example is Cesare Borgia: his cruelty in pacifying the Romagna reconciled the province, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. A compassionate Florence, by contrast, allowed internal feuds to continue until they devastated entire districts. A handful of exemplary executions is more merciful than the toleration of disorder — because disorder hurts everyone, while executions hurt only those executed. This is the meaning of 'cruelty well used', introduced in Chapter 8 and here applied to the prince's day-to-day governance.
The question of whether it is better to be loved or feared receives its famous answer: it is best to be both, but since this is difficult, it is much safer to be feared than loved if one of the two must be dispensed with. The reasoning is psychological. Love is held by a chain of obligation that men — ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, and covetous — will break whenever it suits them. Fear is held by a dread of punishment that does not let go. A prince who relies on love is abandoned when he needs loyalty most; a prince who commands fear is not.
The chapter's pivot, which most readers who quote the love-or-fear passage overlook, comes in the second half. A prince must avoid being hated above all. He may be feared without being loved, but he cannot be safe if he is hated. The prince becomes hated by doing one of two things: taking his subjects' property or violating the honour of their women. He must abstain from both. A prince who is feared but does neither of these things will find that his subjects' fear coexists with goodwill — they may not love him, but they will not conspire against him or welcome his enemies. The analysis closes with the observation that a prince commanding his own armies must not worry about being considered cruel, because military command that is not harsh enough to maintain discipline is genuinely clemency's enemy.
- Chapter 1Machiavelli opens not with a chapter but with a letter — one of the most celebrated dedications in European literature.
- Chapter 2The book's first chapter is a taxonomy so compressed it reads like a table of contents for the entire argument.
- Chapter 3Machiavelli's analysis of hereditary principalities is deliberately brief because the argument is simple: long-settled states are easier to hold than new ones.
- Chapter 4This is the book's first major analysis, and Machiavelli uses France's disastrous Italian campaigns as his case study.
- Chapter 5Machiavelli uses Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia versus the repeated French failures in Italy to introduce one of his sharpest analytical distinctions: the difference between states governed through a single lord with servile administrators and states governed through a lord with independent barons.
- Chapter 6Machiavelli confronts one of the hardest problems in The Prince: what to do with a conquered city that has historically governed itself.
- Chapter 7Machiavelli turns to the most admirable category: the prince who rises from nothing by his own ability.
- Chapter 8This is the chapter that establishes Cesare Borgia as The Prince's central case study — the man who came closest to the political ideal, whose eventual failure was attributable entirely to fortune rather than to any deficiency in his method.
- Chapter 9Machiavelli refuses to praise Agathocles's murders as virtù, but he cannot deny that they worked.
- Chapter 10Chapter 9 introduces Machiavelli's social analysis: every city contains two humours, the people who wish not to be oppressed and the great who wish to oppress.
- Chapter 11This short chapter introduces a practical test for evaluating a principality's stability: can the prince, if attacked, maintain himself with his own resources, or must he always rely on others? Machiavelli uses the fortified German free cities as his model — towns with strong walls, substantial reserves, and organised citizens who can defend themselves for at least a year without outside help.
- Chapter 12Machiavelli's treatment of the Church is one of the book's most revealing moments — not because it is disrespectful, but because it applies the same analytical framework to the papacy that it applies to every other state.
- Chapter 13Machiavelli's hatred of mercenary armies is the most consistent passion in The Prince, and this chapter is its fullest expression.
- Chapter 14Auxiliaries — troops borrowed from a foreign power — are worse than mercenaries, Machiavelli argues, because at least mercenaries are divided among themselves.
- Chapter 15The chapter is short and absolute.
- Chapter 16Chapter 15 is the hinge on which the entire book turns.
- Chapter 17The argument of Chapter 16 runs against the ordinary wisdom of every medieval mirror-of-princes tradition: a reputation for liberality, sincerely maintained, is ruinous.
- Chapter 18Chapter 17 contains the most famous argument in the book, and it is more careful than its reputation suggests.
- Chapter 19Chapter 18 is the most disputed in the book and the one that earned Machiavelli his reputation as the theorist of bad faith.
- Chapter 20The longest chapter in the book synthesises the ethical analysis of the preceding chapters into a comprehensive theory of internal security.
- Chapter 21Machiavelli surveys the range of defensive strategies princes have used — disarming subjects, fostering internal factions, building fortresses, cultivating those they mistrusted — and delivers a nuanced verdict.
- Chapter 22Chapter 21 turns from the negative task of avoiding hatred and contempt to the positive task of building a reputation that sustains power.
- Chapter 23This short chapter on the choice of ministers is a compressed theory of institutional trust.
- Chapter 24The problem of flattery is, for Machiavelli, an epistemic problem before it is a moral one.
- Chapter 25Chapter 24 applies the book's principles to the immediate Italian political situation and delivers a harsh verdict.
- Chapter 26Chapter 25 contains the book's most sustained philosophical argument and its most famous image.
- Chapter 27The book's final chapter drops the cool analytical register of everything that preceded it and becomes a plea.